CHICAGO -- Mark Reuss, General Motors Co.'s North America president, says his company is listening better to customers.

In one case, a customer who had been complaining about a vehicle's persistent rattle was fed up that nobody could fix it. Reuss dispatched an engineer to the customer's house on New Year's Eve to find and fix it.

"A customer for life," Reuss, a low-key executive with an engineering background, said last week during a Chicago Auto Show speech.

"Every day our agents search Facebook and Twitter accounts," checking to see whether customers who use these social media Web sites are having problems with their vehicles, he said. "We've never done that before. I wish we had because we're learning a lot about what we can do better. And I know because I've made a lot of those calls myself.

"Going forward, we'll be doing a lot more of exactly this kind of listening. And the explosion of new social networking tools is playing a huge role here."